Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Piccadilly Circus cutaway view (via magpie-moon and @BibliOdyssey)

Via fmass, blandben, and hannahcooper

I love this kind of thing. I posted something similar about King’s Cross a while back, and it’s as equally confusing as it is awesome.

I like to think that I have a very good sense of direction, and pretty much always know which way I’m facing when walking, driving or on a train, but Tube stations just completely throw me. Anything which involves turning a corner once underground and I lose all sense of which way I came in and whereabouts I am relative to the streets above.

It’s not just the Tube map (PDF) that can be a bit daunting for anyone coming to London. It’s also a mystery for many how to get from one platform to another whilst changing lines at a particular station.

Some stations are ridiculously easy to interchange at (Earl’s Court, for example), whereas others lead you on a seemingly endless sequence of never-ending corridors, turning left, then right, up, then down, before plonking you on the correct platform (Bank, I’m looking at you).

Whilst seasoned Tube users know the quickest routes within a Tube station from one platform to another, it is very easy to have no real sense of direction, nor an overall picture of how they’re all linked.

This is why I like diagrams such as this one (found via London Reconnections), because you can really see just how compact even the biggest interchange stations are, and start to piece together the station’s layout.

Yes, I’m a Tube geek.

What a gorgeous, gorgeous map.

This is central London, taken from the standard A-Z map, but with everything removed apart from the names of streets, stations, and a few major buildings.

You can quite clearly see the river, and a couple of the open spaces around large buildings. Apart from that, though, London is a massive maze of streets, with none of the sense of pre-planning that you find in most American cities (and Milton Keynes!).

And it’s this lack of planning, this organic growth over many centuries, which is why I love London. I still get lost constantly, or deliberately take awkward routes from A to B, just to discover new side streets and new places.

EDIT: I found this map as the background to @londontwirl’s Twitter page. All credit there, although I’m sure it comes from elsewhere first…

Today’s Times carried a report about the hottest areas of London’s Tube network, measured by the temperature at rush hour on the platforms. The survey was carried out on one of the hottest days of last year, with temperatures at street level hitting 30 degrees.

Unfortunately, not a whole lot has changed since this survey was carried out. Tube trains still don’t have air conditioning (and most never will, owing to the extra size needed in the tunnels to accommodate units), and the platforms are pretty unventilated. Some semi-permanent fans have been installed in a couple of stations (King’s Cross Victoria line springs to mind), but they don’t have a huge effect.

I try to avoid the Tube during the summer, because it’s just unbearably hot. I’m a sweater, and always seem to get to the other end absolutely dripping. On my daily commute to/from work, I get the overland, proper train, which is usually air-conditioned, and if not is above ground for fresh air through the opened windows. It’s positively enjoyable, to be honest, especially when it’s roasting outside and cold inside.

I had to get the Tube this Saturday to get to the Arsenal game, and owing to a number of closures it was inevitably absolutely rammed. I got on the Piccadilly line at Leicester Square (in the middle of the black X at the centre of this map), and took it north-east to Arsenal. Busy doesn’t even begin to describe…

Now, this is shown as yellow on the heat map, but it was hot. I know it was an exceptional occasion, with more people than usual travelling, but it’s not uncommon for it to be that busy on a normal rush hour. I got through my bottle of coke in double-quick time, and the fresh air couldn’t hit me quickly enough when I got off.

And that was only travelling for seven stops. God knows what it’s like for people on it for longer, especially if they’re going across central London.

And I speak from experience when I say that the Central line is even worse. That’s the left-to-right line in this map, coloured bright red. It’s the closest one to my office, and I occasionally take it after work when I’m heading off to meet someone.

It’s definitely not worth it. So fucking hot, even in winter time. Always busy, always a pain in the ass.

But yet I find myself agreeing with something diamondgeezer wrote a few months back (that I can’t find now!): the money that Transport for London could spend on air conditioning for Tubes, and this runs into the billions, should be spent on simply improving capacity. More trains = less waiting on platforms, fewer passengers on each train, and so less heat overall. Simple.

I’ll leave the last word to Charlie Brooker’s column today:

On the platform, morose expressions laminated by a thin sheen of grime and sweat; hangdog mugs smeared with London. There’s no air-con on the underground, so on a hot day people quickly resemble clothed piglets trapped in a can, waiting for the air to run out.

Yay, I did it! I was only intending to do a little 10-15 minute loop, just to get the feeling back into my legs, but I ended up doing 3 miles instead. No idea what time I did it in, and I was definitely flagging towards the end, but I didn’t stop until right outside my front door.

It was good to get out there, especially because I’d had a shitty last half-hour at work that I know I’m going to get it in the neck for first thing tomorrow. I’d been thinking about nothing else on my way home, so to let my mind get off that was a godsend.

It was great to feel the sun beating down on me, the wind in my face and just the great outdoors all around me. And it was good to achieve this little something: to have a plan to get out there after work and to go through with it. Little victories.

Noraleah’s post with a very informative, visual guide to how the recession is affecting different areas of the US reminded me that I’d seen something pretty similar for the UK on the BBC News site earlier today.

The BBC has been tracking such data points as unemployment, house prices, repossession rates and so forth, and has put them together in a great map so that you can instantly see which regions are being hit hardest by the recession in the UK.

The interesting tool is the slider at the bottom. You can see how the whole country has progressively turned a darker shade of blue over the last 18 months. But it’s worth pointing out that the areas which already had above-average unemployment remain those with the highest jobless rates. The recession isn’t really affecting one region worse than any other; it’s affecting everywhere equally badly.

It’s amazing how often this kind of picture occurs in the London area of Google Streetview. We have a lot of buses, and they seem to have been swarming around the Google photocar whilst it was going round London…

And I’ve just noticed that the algorithm Google uses to block out faces has done so for the girl in the advert as well. Heh.

Google Streetview has expanded in Europe, covering a good chunk of Britain (more on that later), as well as Holland, France, and some other countries too. The best coverage is of course in the big cities, and particularly in the capitals.

The map above is central Amsterdam, where Google have quite pointedly decided not to include the red-light district in its covered areas. The blue-outlined streets have Streetview available, but the white streets around Bloedstraat don’t.

This is the famed area with all of the girls in the windows, and sex clubs everywhere you look. I’ve only been there at nighttime, but I’m sure there are girls on display pretty much 24/7. And it’s hard to ignore the cinema-style shopfronts all along the streets, advertising LIVE SEX SHOWS and so on.

Google’s moral attitude shining through? It’s definitely possible to drive a car down those streets, as evidenced by the view from the tip of Oudezijds Achterburgwal, looking north. Anyways, interesting.